Search results for "Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics"
showing 10 items of 1668 documents
Cosmic Dark Radiation and Neutrinos
2013
New measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) by the Planck mission have greatly increased our knowledge about the universe. Dark radiation, a weakly interacting component of radiation, is one of the important ingredients in our cosmological model which is testable by Planck and other observational probes. At the moment, the possible existence of dark radiation is an unsolved question. For instance, the discrepancy between the value of the Hubble constant, H-0, inferred from the Planck data and local measurements of H-0 can to some extent be alleviated by enlarging the minimal ACDM model to include additional relativistic degrees of freedom. From a fundamental physics point of v…
Uncertainty on w from large-scale structure
2012
We find that if we live at the center of an inhomogeneity with total density contrast of roughly 0.1, dark energy is not a cosmological constant at 95% confidence level. Observational constraints on the equation of state of dark energy, w, depend strongly on the local matter density around the observer. We model the local inhomogeneity with an exact spherically symmetric solution which features a pressureless matter component and a dark-energy fluid with constant equation of state and negligible sound speed, that reaches a homogeneous solution at finite radius. We fit this model to observations of the local expansion rate, distant supernovae and the cosmic microwave background. We conclude …
Black hole lightning due to particle acceleration at subhorizon scales
2015
Supermassive black holes with masses of millions to billions of solar masses are commonly found in the centers of galaxies. Astronomers seek to image jet formation using radio interferometry, but still suffer from insufficient angular resolution. An alternative method to resolve small structures is to measure the time variability of their emission. Here, we report on gamma-ray observations of the radio galaxy IC 310 obtained with the MAGIC telescopes revealing variability with doubling time scales faster than 4.8 min. Causality constrains the size of the emission region to be smaller than 20\% of the gravitational radius of its central black hole. We suggest that the emission is associated …
ARES I: WASP-76 b, A Tale of Two HST Spectra
2020
We analyse the transmission and emission spectra of the ultra-hot Jupiter WASP-76b, observed with the G141 grism of the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). We reduce and fit the raw data for each observation using the open-source software Iraclis before performing a fully Bayesian retrieval using the publicly available analysis suite TauRex 3. Previous studies of the WFC3 transmission spectra of WASP-76 b found hints of titanium oxide (TiO) and vanadium oxide (VO) or non-grey clouds. Accounting for a fainter stellar companion to WASP-76, we reanalyse this data and show that removing the effects of this background star changes the slope of the spectrum, resulting in these vi…
Monitoring the Morphology of M87* in 2009-2017 with the Event Horizon Telescope
2020
All authors: Wielgus, Maciek; Akiyama, Kazunori; Blackburn, Lindy; Chan, Chi-kwan; Dexter, Jason; Doeleman, Sheperd S.; Fish, Vincent L.; Issaoun, Sara; Johnson, Michael D.; Krichbaum, Thomas P.; Lu, Ru-Sen; Pesce, Dominic W.; Wong, George N.; Bower, Geoffrey C.; Broderick, Avery E.; Chael, Andrew; Chatterjee, Koushik; Gammie, Charles F.; Georgiev, Boris; Hada, Kazuhiro Loinard, Laurent; Markoff, Sera; Marrone, Daniel P.; Plambeck, Richard; Weintroub, Jonathan; Dexter, Matthew; MacMahon, David H. E.; Wright, Melvyn; Alberdi, Antxon; Alef, Walter; Asada, Keiichi; Azulay, Rebecca; Baczko, Anne-Kathrin; Ball, David; Baloković, Mislav; Barausse, Enrico; Barrett, John; Bintley, Dan; Boland, Wilf…
Multiband RadioAstron space VLBI imaging of the jet in quasar S5 0836+710
2019
Open Access article, published by EDP Sciences, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.-- Open Access funding provided by Max Planck Society.
Recognition of polychromatic three-dimensional objects
2004
We propose to use optical multichannel correlation in various chromatic systems to obtain a setup for recognition of polychromatic three-dimensional (3-D) objects based on Fourier-transform profilometry. Because red-green-blue color components are not able to split the luminance information of objects in a defined component, when the 3-D objects are brighter than the reference objects the correlation result gives false alarms. We demonstrate that it is possible to use different color spaces that can split luminance from chromatic information to yield adequate recognition of polychromatic 3-D objects. We show experimental results that prove the utility of the proposed method.
Relativistic beaming and gamma-ray brightness of blazars
2009
We investigate the dependence of gamma-ray brightness of blazars on intrinsic properties of their parsec-scale radio jets and the implication for relativistic beaming. By combining apparent jet speeds derived from high-resolution VLBA images from the MOJAVE program with millimetre-wavelength flux density monitoring data from Metsahovi Radio Observatory, we estimate the jet Doppler factors, Lorentz factors, and viewing angles for a sample of 62 blazars. We study the trends in these quantities between the sources which were detected in gamma-rays by the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) during its first three months of science operations and those which were not detected. The LAT-detected blaz…
Revealing the structure of the lensed quasar Q 0957+561. I. Accretion disk size
2021
We thank the anonymous referee for the helpful comments, and constructive remarks on this manuscript. We thank the GLENDAMA project for making publicly available the monitoring data of Q 0957+561. C.F. gratefully acknowledges the financial support from Tel Aviv University and University of Haifa through a DFG grant HA3555-14/1. E.M. and J.A.M are supported by the Spanish MINECO with the grants AYA2016- 79104-C3-1-P and AYA2016-79104-C3-3-P. J.A.M. is also supported from the Generalitat Valenciana project of excellence Prometeo/2020/085. J.J.V. is supported by the project AYA2017-84897-P financed by the Spanish Ministerio de Economia y Competividad and by the Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regi…
Determination of Cl/C and Br/C ratios in pure organic solids using laser-induced plasma spectroscopy in near vacuum ultraviolet
2004
Several solid organic compounds containing bromine and chlorine were analyzed with laser-induced plasma spectroscopy. Emission lines were detected in the near vacuum ultraviolet spectral region by using a gas-purged spectrograph and an intensified charge-coupled device detector. The performance of this setup in the determination of the halides in the organic samples was evaluated. Carbon emission lines in the near vacuum ultraviolet were used as internal standards for the measurement of chlorine and bromine. Linear correlation was found between the carbon and halogen emission signal ratio and the corresponding atomic ratio of the compound.